Raven Roll Bar

Kirk or AutoPower. Which roll bar to get. I had considered both, since 2 good friends of mine, Tonggi and NYBeater, were running Kirk bars. I liked the way they looked but after Mvez chimed in on the Raven Roll Bar, I was sold. A bolt in roll bar, unless your welding there are no compromises, that would retain the rear seats (or what part of the seats you wanted to keep). I needed it.

I called John Dimoff of Raven performance (]www.ravenperformance.com) in early January of 2009 and told him that me and my friend (lightwerkz) were interested in purchasing one of their bolt in roll bars each. He told me that he had one that was 90% made and another one he could make in about 1 month. He said he had an issue w/shipping to the US, but I told him that would be fine since me and Lightwerkz would be driving up to Toronto to pick them up (driving 8 hrs and staying one night is cheaper than having 2 roll bars shipped across our border to the north). I gave him 6 weeks and left a 50% deposit and in 6 weeks, we drove up and received the bars

I was going to go w/Flat black or something along those lines, but thats so boring. Plus I trust Lightwerkz and their painting skills, so I went ahead with colour matching my bar to the car – Silver Grey (Paint Code A08).

The process of installing this roll bar is quite simple. You remove the front seats, remove the center console and shifter gate if you are anal like me and want to keep things ultra fresh. Once those are removed, remove the lower seat cushion and identify the 2 unused seat belt torx bolts on the right and left and undo them. They also have brackets hovering over them. Undo those and bolt down the bottom portion of the raven roll bar. It will look like this

View of the T50 Torx

Some people complained about how much space was under the front foot of the roll bar. Here is an image of my finger jammed under there. This was me pushing down on the carpet and getting under there.

Once the bar has been bolted in and torqued down, I opted to remove the fold down rear seats to offset the addition of the roll bar (38 lbs), but kept the bottom seat which gave the car a somewhat factory look.

After that it was just bolting up the seats and the harnesses. Before we could mount the seats we needed to mount the 5th and 6th points of the harnesses to the seat. VAC and Stable Energies reccomend mounting these points either to the floor or to the floor mount. VAC actually makes a mount that attaches one side of the floor mount to the other, with holes for eyebolts.

Roll BAR PART 3

After that was done, the seats went in, and the lap belts were hooked onto the points assigned to them, and the shoulder belts went on and we were good to go.

All in all it was one of the best modifications I have done on this car. I always say If i could redo my car I would do coilovers, bbk, ssk, recaros, roll bar, and 4.10 gears —-and a lot of other stuff – as usual